From Left to right is Robin
with her robot Mabel, Bruce with his robot Leaf, and Alex with Rocky.

All are equipped with
microphones, speakers and webcam. Bruce's robot shows the sophisticated
CSLU animated face; and Rocky shows the simpler animation image. In
addition, Rocky shows an image captured from his webcam.

While Mabel and Rocky are
almost identical twins, Leaf shows how the basic architecture can be
customized extensively.

The Leaf Project is a group robot development
program. The objective is to develop a robot platform that supports experiments with Artificial Intelligence, vision, navigation etc. For
more, see Objectives.

Here are a some of the new Leaf Bots as of the
end of 2008 Observe that a "Leaf robot" does not imply a form
factor, just the electronics and software. All pictures can be clicked to
enlarge..

Leaf began as an Artificial Life program that
Bruce Weimer demonstrated at our robotics club, the Robotics Society of Southern
California. Bruce's artificial person, Leaf, was inspired by the computer
game Creatures, by Steve Grand, in which artificial beings hatch, develop,
and interact in a simulated environment. Bruce's creature included
personality, response to spoken commands and vision.

Alex Brown felt that it wasn't fair to keep
Leaf locked up in a PC; he wanted to let him loose in the world. Leaf
needed a body. He designed a simple platform supporting basic
mobility, sensing and supporting control from an on-board PC environment.

Robin Hewitt provided a webcam implementation
to give the Leaf bots vision and software to provide several visual capabilities
including finding a homebase circle. See her website for details (in
Software/Vision)

Many other capabilities have been added to
Leaf. Some have been made standard in the code provided here and others
have been added to specific builders' robots:

This is an open source project. Use of
existing software is limited to that which is commonly available or free.
All new-development robot software is open source, free and fully
documented. Hardware designs are either fully documented or have enough
information and advice for a builder to develop their own compatible designs.

Building a large PC based robot is a big task for many of us, requiring learning a lot of new
skills. We hope
that this website will provide shortcuts to help others get starting building
robots in the PC world.

Also, we have a wiki
at en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Programming_AI_with_Leaf. This wiki is
intended to be a repository for help in installing and troubleshooting the
software as well as new functionality developed for Leaf.

NEW!

(7/26/12)

Added documentation allowing a Leaf robot to
operate ROS software. This is an advanced feature and is not intended to
replace the standard Windows version of Leaf. Click the link below for
more information.

(11/2/10)

Added updated version of SD84 dll software
including how to incorporate SD84 access to the Lisp code (see Software /
Utilities)

Repaired links to microcontroller wiring
test software.
Minor change to microcontroller assembly
procedure. Changed reference to R15 in step 9 to R18.
Added a note not to install the Microsoft Speech API into
Windows 7 or Vista. A better version is already in Vista and 7.

(5/3/09)

Update for Nav and Control is added.
See Software / Nav and Control for details.

(4/21/09)

Next revision of Microcontroller code is
posted. Check the Software/Microcontroller page for details. Added my new robot, Rocky 2, to the Family
Tree page.

(1/1/09)

General upgrades to the text and/or
pictures on many pagesUpdated microcontroller procedures and
manuals to cover board revisions 0 to 3.

(10/31/08)

Got the Useful Links page (below) going.

(10/6/08)

Bruce has finalized his
program for avoiding the 5 hour time limit on the LispWorks compiler. His
new programs will allow Leaf to run indefinitely. For details and
download, go to Software/Lisp page